The 2026 Classic Car Market at the Close of Q1: A Record Top End, A Softening Middle, and the Monaco Test

April 25, 2026

The K-shape comes for the garage

The classic and collector car market entered the second quarter of 2026 with two stories running at once, and they are not the same story. At the top, a small group of seven- and eight-figure cars produced one of the strongest live-auction quarters in the modern era, capped by a $16.5 million Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Spider in early March. Below that ceiling, the broad collector market is doing something far less glamorous: it is sitting still, fighting inflation, and quietly grinding lower.

For owners and lenders, that bifurcation matters more than any single record price. It changes the math on what an asset is worth as collateral, what a buyer will pay this month versus next, and how aggressive a private seller can be without giving up the deal. This is the Borro Market Intelligence Desk’s quarterly read on a market that has decisively split into two — and on what the next set of test events, from RM Sotheby’s Monaco to Mecum Indy and the Goodwood Members’ Meeting, is about to reveal about the second half.

The headline number: a flat market that isn’t flat at the top

The cleanest single read on the U.S. collector car market remains the Hagerty Market Rating, which blends private-sale activity, auction performance, expert sentiment, insurance value requests, and macroeconomic indicators into one number. In its March 25, 2026 update, Hagerty’s Adam Wilcox reported the Rating at 59.01 — its highest reading in six months, but still firmly inside the 50-to-60 band Hagerty defines as “flat market” territory, where it has now sat for nearly a year.

One month later, in its April 23, 2026 update, Hagerty reported the Rating slipped 0.11 points to 58.9, with monthly inflation hitting 0.9% — the highest single-month reading since the summer of 2022. As Hagerty notes, the Market Rating adjusts for inflation when evaluating sale prices, “so a sudden spike in inflation makes already-soft market performance look worse.” The Rating has now hovered between 58 and 61 for 15 consecutive months.

The companion Hagerty Market Index, the open-ended stock-market-style version of the Rating, tells a less stable story. It closed the March reading at 171.04, the lowest level in over four years and a 17% drop from its high in December 2022, after declining for three consecutive months. The April update showed it rising 0.91 points — the largest single-month jump in over three years — but doing so against a backdrop where two of the three components driving the move (Hagerty stock proxy, gold price as alternative-asset signal) reflected stress, not strength.

What is moving down inside that flat headline number is, specifically, the middle and bottom of the market. According to Hagerty’s March 2026 reading:

The Auction Median Sale Price hit a record low of 15.38, “again failed to outpace inflation,” and slipped further to 14.67 by April — another record low.
Average Sale Price and the Percentage of Cars Selling Above Insured Value both fell, hitting their lowest combined point in a year.
Private Sales Activity dropped 1.2 points in April to 63.7, its lowest reading since the summer of 2021.
For vehicles under $250,000, Hagerty members’ ratio of insured-value increase requests to decrease requests has only ticked up once in the past 15 months. For high-end vehicles, that ratio has increased in eight of those 15 months.

The widely cited Hagerty Price Guide publisher Dave Kinney summarized the dynamic plainly: “The wealthy buyer has not been affected by the turbid worldwide economic events, and they are willing and eager to spend. I would not read this upward tic as optimism about the next quarter, but rather my reading of today’s collector car market.”

The transaction layer: Q1 2026 was a record top end

Hagerty’s sentiment-and-insurance dataset is one window. The transaction record from CLASSIC.COM’s Market Report for March 2026, published April 7, is another, and it makes the bifurcation impossible to miss. Through the close of Q1 2026, against roughly the same number of total listings as Q1 2025:

Dollar volume is up 31%
Average price is up 27%
Sell-through is up 6 percentage points

“2026 is already a record-breaking year for the specialty car market — and we’re only three months in,” CLASSIC.COM’s editors wrote in the March report. The platform recorded 37 cars crossing the million-dollar mark in March alone, and the top 21 sales of the entire month came out of a single weekend on the Florida coast — the early-March Amelia Island auctions split between Gooding Christie’s and Broad Arrow.

That weekend deserves its own paragraph, because it set the tone for the quarter and is now the benchmark every subsequent 2026 sale will be measured against.

Amelia Island 2026: the spring tentpole

Combined, the two main Amelia auction houses offered more than 300 lots and generated over $180 million in total sales — a significant increase over the roughly $129 million achieved at Amelia 2025, per the consolidated Magneto roundup.

Broad Arrow Auctions (March 6–7, 2026 at The Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island), per the company’s official release of March 9, 2026:

$111 million in total sales — the highest-grossing auction in the 31-year history of The Amelia Concours, and Broad Arrow’s most successful sale since the firm was founded in 2021.
92% sell-through (165 of 179 lots).
13 world auction records set, including a 2005 Porsche Carrera GT at $6,715,000, a 1972 Lamborghini Miura P400 SV at $6,605,000, a 1988 Porsche 959 Sport at $5,505,000, a 2021 Ferrari Monza SP2 at $4,955,000, and a 2017 Ferrari F12tdf at $4,185,000.
20 cars sold for over $1 million.

Gooding Christie’s (March 5–6, 2026 at the Omni Amelia Island Resort), per Classic Car Auctions’ compiled results and the firm’s release:

$70.4 million in total sales (vs. $67.4 million at Amelia 2025), the firm’s strongest Amelia sale since its first there in 2010.
94% sell-through on 124 lots.
13 cars over $1 million.
Top lot: a 1960 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Spider with hardtop, chassis 1963 GT, sold for $16,505,000 — the most expensive car of Florida Car Week 2026, and per Classic Car Auctions’ running record, the 11th-most-expensive 250 GT California Spider ever sold and the 15th California Spider result above $10 million.

The pattern that runs through both sales is the same pattern Hagerty’s data shows from a different angle: the right car at the top of the market is producing record competitive bidding. Hagerty’s own post-sale roundup of Broad Arrow noted that the “auctions that have occurred in the first quarter of 2026 show plenty of enthusiasm on high-end cars that skew to a young demographic,” even as “a large volume of cars sold in those same sales have produced ho-hum results, with an overall slight downward trend.”

The bifurcation, in plain English

If you pull the threads together, what you have is a market with two distinct populations behaving in two different ways:

Ultra-high-end (loosely, $1M+): Q1 2026 produced one of the strongest top-end auction quarters on record. Sell-through rates at the Amelia houses (94% and 92%) are not soft-market numbers — they are full-market numbers. World records are being set across categories: vintage Italian (Miura SV), modern supercar (Carrera GT, Monza SP2), modern Ferrari halo (F12tdf), and reference-condition Porsche (959 Sport). Hagerty data shows the value-up-request ratio for high-end vehicles has been trending positive in eight of the last 15 months.

Mid-market and below (loosely, sub-$250K): Median sale prices are at record lows in real terms. Private-sale activity is at a five-year low. Insurance value-up requests for sub-$250K vehicles have only been net positive once in the last 15 months. The “ho-hum” results Hagerty flagged are concentrated here — cars that would have moved cleanly at 2022 prices are now either grinding to no-sales or trading at meaningful discounts to where they last printed.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Hagerty offers the cleanest framing: “The recent increase was almost entirely due to activity at the top of the market, among the most expensive cars. However, the lower end of the market is dropping out as those buyers get squeezed by a tightening economy, while the top-end remains unaffected.”

The macro context: a Fed that is done cutting (for now), and tangible-asset flows

The bifurcation has macro fingerprints. Per the FOMC statement of March 18, 2026, the Committee held the federal funds target at 3.50%–3.75%, with one dissent (Stephen Miran, preferring a 25-basis-point cut). The accompanying Summary of Economic Projections lifted both 2026 GDP growth (to 2.4%) and 2026 PCE/Core PCE inflation (to 2.7% each) versus the December 2025 projection round, and the median dot showed one cut in 2026 followed by another in 2027. Seven of 19 participants signaled they expected rates to stay unchanged through year-end, one more than in December.

For the mid-market collector, that math is unhelpful. A buyer financing a $150,000–$250,000 car at near-7% is making a different decision than the same buyer at 4.5%, and a year of sticky inflation has chipped at discretionary balance sheets.

For the top of the market, the math runs the other way. Hagerty’s March commentary explicitly hypothesized that “the wealthy are moving away from more standard investments and toward tangible assets — including multi-million-dollar supercars — while the future of the greater economy looks more uncertain.” The note that gold rose nearly 50% over the prior six months, and that the Hagerty-tracked S&P 500 monthly average dropped for the first time in nearly a year, gives the hypothesis some company in the data.

That is the through-line connecting Q1 collector cars to the K-shaped reads we have been documenting in the art and watch markets this season: across categories, the trophy tier is absorbing capital that does not want to sit in equities, while the middle of every category is paying for the inflation print and the rate path.

What to watch next: Monaco, Indy, Goodwood, then Monterey

The next set of test events for the top end runs from this weekend through summer.

RM Sotheby’s Monaco — April 24–25, 2026, Grimaldi Forum. Per RM Sotheby’s auction details and the Octane preview, the biennial Monaco sale carries a combined pre-sale estimate near €25 million. Headline lots include a 1962 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Spider by Scaglietti with a $17–$19 million estimate (a direct comp to the Gooding Christie’s California Spider that just printed $16.5M at Amelia), a 2018 Ferrari FXX-K Evo, a 2004 Ferrari Enzo, and a 2014 Ferrari LaFerrari in Signal Green. The marquee racing lot is the 1984 Toleman TG183B chassis 05, the car in which Ayrton Senna made his Formula 1 debut at the 1984 Brazilian Grand Prix, on a €2.8M–€3.8M ($3.27M–$4.44M) estimate per the RM lot page.

Bonhams Monaco — April 24, 2026, Fairmont Monte Carlo. Per Bonhams’ auction page and Magneto’s preview, Bonhams’ Mediterranean Masterpiece sale is led by an ex-Graham Hill 1958 Lotus 16, two Group B Audi Quattro rally cars (a 1983 Audi Quattro A2 driven by Hannu Mikkola estimated at €900K–€1.2M), 1990s DTM machines including Alessandro Nannini’s 1995 Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI (€500K–€600K), a delivery-mileage 2024 Ferrari 812 Competizione Aperta (€1.75M–€2M), and a 2021 Lamborghini Sián.

Mecum Indianapolis — May 8–16, 2026, Indiana State Fairgrounds. Mecum’s flagship spring sale is the largest by lot count of any 2026 spring auction and the cleanest read on the American mid-market, where the softness in the data is most concentrated. Per Classic Car Auctions’ preview, headline supercar lots include a 56-mile delivery-condition 2014 Ferrari LaFerrari, but the more diagnostic data will come from the long tail of muscle cars and mid-market classics.

Bonhams at Goodwood Members’ Meeting — April 11–12, 2026 (already concluded as of this writing). Per Magneto’s preview, Bonhams brought 37 lots to the Members’ Meeting led by three cars from the late artist Michael Turner’s collection, including his long-owned 1939 Jaguar SS100 (DTF 28), believed to represent one of the longest continuous ownerships of any of the 3.5-litre SS100s.

The summer reset: Monterey Car Week, August 2026. Hagerty was explicit in its March commentary: “The next large-scale, public test of the top end of the market will be at the Monterey auctions in August.” Monterey’s combined gross is the closest annual analogue we have to a quarterly earnings print for the collector car market. If the Q1 trophy bid follows through into August, the K-shape thesis hardens. If Monterey softens at the top while the middle continues to grind, the picture changes meaningfully.

The classic.com online layer: live still owns the trophies

One quieter but important data point from CLASSIC.COM’s March report: of the 37 cars that crossed the million-dollar mark in March 2026, only two sold online. The top online sale ranked 31st overall against the live-auction record. As CLASSIC.COM’s editors put it, “Spring market is where online auctions shine” for the volume mid-market — but at the trophy tier, “the right car, the right crowd, and a little competitive electricity still does things a browser window can’t replicate.”

That is consistent with what Borro sees on the financing side. Online platforms have become the default execution venue for cars under roughly $250,000 — and a useful, fast pricing reference for everything below that line. Above $1 million, deals are still made in rooms, on phones, and in the negotiated space between major sales houses, where the buyer pool is small enough to identify by name.

What this means for owners and asset-backed borrowers

For owners considering a sale or a borrow against their car right now, the bifurcation reframes the decision in three concrete ways.

1. Top-tier consignors: the bid is there, but the calendar matters. If your car is a top-condition example of a model with a recent record print — Carrera GT, Miura SV, F12tdf, Monza SP2, prewar Ferrari, top-grade 250-series — the auction calendar between now and Monterey is the strongest demand window of the year. The Monaco sales this weekend, the U.S. summer sales, and Monterey in August are the three peak-bid moments.

2. Mid-market sellers: this is not a strong sell window. Auction Median Sale Price is at a record low. Private-sale activity is at a five-year low. Sub-$250K insurance-value increase requests are running net negative. A car that hammered well in 2022 will not necessarily hammer well in Q2 2026, and the discount required to clear a sub-$250K car at auction has measurably widened. For an owner who does not need to sell, the most expensive transaction is the unforced one.

3. The borrow-against-the-car alternative. This is exactly the spread Borro has been built around: an asset can be illiquid for selling and still be liquid for borrowing. The auction record establishes the comp. The lender takes the asset. The owner gets capital without selling into a soft window — and retains the upside if the market firms into Monterey or beyond. For top-tier cars, the comp is at a multi-year high. For mid-market cars, a properly underwritten advance can be the difference between selling at a Q2 2026 print and selling at whatever the market looks like 12 months from now.

This is not a forecast. It is a description of how the data, the auction calendar, and the macro picture line up at the close of Q1 2026, sourced to Hagerty, CLASSIC.COM, the official auction-house releases, and the Federal Reserve. The market is not flat. The market is split. And whether the split holds, narrows, or breaks is the question Monaco starts answering this weekend.

The Borro Market Intelligence Desk publishes data-driven analysis of the luxury asset markets — watches, art, classic cars, jewelry, and macro. All figures sourced to named publications and verified within 30 days. For asset-backed borrowing against fine art, classic cars, watches, and jewelry, visit borro.com.

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